transitlab

Image by sctv via Flickr

Whilst I didn’t get to BarcampLondon last week, I was present at some fairly interesting conversations and seminars.

Monday was a talk by cognitive development talk by Professor Linda Smith(papers on website). She and her team are investigating how children develop language and object abstraction. Somewhere between 18 and 24 months, children start ‘getting’ certain things, like that if a horizontal block is turned, it can be made to fit in a vertical aperture. The 18month kids just don’t get it, keep bashing and bashing until they hand it back to their instructor, who demonstrates it easily. Even after this the child still does not get it.

What was interesting was the interrelatedness of learning vocabularies and identifying objects. Increasing attention to shape causes more rapid noun learning.

Image by sctv via Flickr

So what is happening, Proff Smith argues that there are cascades at work, a multicausal, wierd loop, with nontrivial spread process. That there is a broadly interconnected developmental ecosystem that is what gives us the power to identify and classify, and that it is tied into the physical presence of the object.

This was a great talk put on by the Cognition and Communication research lab CoCo at Northumbria University. It was interesting to see that as well as psychologists, there were also engineers and design lecturers present, a wide audience